Tag Archives: housing bubble

Calculated Risk for years has provided better economic forecasts and data collection than the expensive paid services with their relentless bubble boosterism.

I also owe him personally for helping to expose the ticking time bomb of subprime and option-ARM mortgages way back in 2006. That was a very good year for my personal portfolio! Nonetheless I have to disagree with his mild optimism on housing expressed here:

He argues that residential investment may have reached bottom earlier this year, and their recovery in Q3 and Q4 will boost the rest of the economy, and also points to possible recoveries in autos and business inventories.

I think, more likely, these “green shoots” will soon be overwhelmed by the continuing collapse of much of the rest of the economy.

Even if autos and residential RE construction recover somewhat, what about the following:

Banks without cheap federal financing?

State and local government spending?

Commercial real estate?

Unemployment and income declines?

Decreasing velocity of money due to high marginal propensity to save?

Rolling waves of defaults as cheap bubble debt matures, from Option ARMs to leveraged loans to credit cards to commercial lines of credit?

The hundreds of thousands of small and medium-size businesses affected by the impending CIT Group bankruptcy and the massive closing of unsecured credit lines by Amex and Adventa earlier this year?

Each of these are contributing to deflationary headwinds that, in my opinion, will smother any spark of recovery in real estate or autos for at least the next three quarters.

Median income in Chula Vista’s 91914 zip code is above the national average. The problem, however, is that it’s not far enough above the average to support the insanely high prices of the 2003-2007 bubble years. Banks that loaned money for purchase of these homes during this time have only just began reporting what will turn out to be many millions of losses from these loans. Of course many of these loans ended up in mortgage-backed securities. Investors in these instruments also will lose millions, just from this single, lightly populated suburban zip code. Here is a small sample of the losses. All of these are either foreclosures or short sales: